Obama Vs. Congress: This Week’s Big Fight Over Zika Money
As the Zika virus heads north, a billion dollar battle over Zika funding is playing out in Washington D.C. Scientists are angry at how long it’s taken. UPDATE: Late on Wednesday night, the House passed its Zika funding bill in a 281-184 vote.
Luis Robayo / AFP / Getty Images
The impending threat of Zika has thrown Congress into a fight with the White House over paying for doctors, tests, vaccines, and mosquito spray to stave off the mosquito-borne virus linked to severe birth defects in a 50-nation outbreak.
"We think this is the best way to go," Rep. Harold Rogers of Kentucky, chair of the House's spending committee, said on Tuesday. "This is zeroed in on Zika," he said, saying that Congress might request more money to combat the virus after September, "if necessary."
But other lawmakers, such as Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, called the House bill too little. "Quite frankly, that's just not going to cut it," Rubio told The Hill on Tuesday.
And on Wednesday, CDC director Tom Frieden echoed this disappointment in a closed-door meeting of House Democrats, according to ABC News.
The Senate's version was passed in a bipartisan vote that didn't get a veto threat. It's still less than the $1.9 billion the White House had requested in February, when the World Health Organization declared a Zika' a "public health emergency" over severe microcephaly, the shrunken head birth defect linked to infections with the virus during pregnancy in more than 1,000 cases in Brazil.